Newsweek

Newsweek is a weekly news magazine covering current events and politics in America. Newsweek magazine is published by Newsweek, Inc. and is headquartered in New York, N.Y. It has been published since 1933 and is currently owned by Sidney Harman. Newsweek covers national news and is the second largest weekly news magazine in the United States, behind Time Magazine. Newsweek was founded in 1933 as News-Week by Thomas J.C. Martyn, a former foreign Time magazine editor. At that time, the magazine cost 10 cents a copy and $4 per year. The name changed to Newsweek in 1937 and it merged with Raymond Moley's weekly magazine, Today. Moley was a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" and to distinguish itself from its competition, Time, which had a similar format, Newsweek carved a reputation for itself as being more liberal and serious in tone. It was the first to assign writer by-lines for its editorial columns. The Washington Post Company bought the magazine in 1961 and its liberal publisher, Katharine Graham, continued to set the publication apart from its two main competitors (Time and U.S. News & World Report). Starting in 2008, the company went through massive restructuring and suffered a reported 50 percent in subscriber rate loss in one year and $28 million in revenue in 2009. The magazine was sold to stereo pioneer Sidney Harman, who is husband to California Congresswoman Jane Harman, in August 2010. Newsweek's editor Jon Meacham's resignation from the magazine coincided with the sale. 52 percent of the readership are men and 47 percent are women. The average age of readers is 52 and 88 percent have either attended or graduated from college. The average personal income of its readers is $99,792.In the 1950s, Newsweek became a leader in in-depth reporting of racial diversity and in the 1960s, under then-editor Osborn Elliott, it became a voice for advocacy journalism, where subjective political positions are countebalanced with facts. In August 1976, Newsweek reported that federal investigators had enough evidence to prove that former Teamsters Union boss James Hoffa was strangled to death July 30, 1974, the day he disappeared outside a suburban Detroit restaurant. The article further reported that the murder was planned and executed outside Michigan. In 1998, Newsweek killed a story about White House intern Monica Lewinsky's sexual relationship with President Bill Clinton. The story broke on news aggregate website, the Drudge Report, which reported that Newsweek's reporter, Michael Isikoff, had gathered enough evidence from sources to publish the story and name Lewinsky, when at the last minute the magazine decided to pull it. Newsweek eventually published the story after the Drudge Report made it public. The magazine is reknowned for its investigative war reporting, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Daniel Klaidman is the Managing Editor.

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Articles from February 4

Bill's Biggest Bet Yet: The Richest People on Earth Have Created a Fund of More Than $24 Billion to Save the Poorest from Disease. How Much of a Difference Can Bill and Melinda Gates Make?

Byline: Geoffrey Cowley How far can you travel in a day? American Airlines Flight 657 covers the distance from New York to Haiti--roughly a light-year, in human terms--in four hours. The flight is packed most weekday mornings. But except for a few...

'Cliff Was Climbing the Walls': Why Did an Exec Who'd Sounded the Alarm Kill Himself?

Byline: Anne Belli Gesalman According to his friends and former colleagues, Clifford Baxter was the kind of guy who knew how to balance his hectic life as a top Enron executive and his private life as a husband and father. Brash and strong-willed,...

Byline: Sharon Begley The last time a panel of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) evaluated whether mammograms save lives, the group debated angrily until 2:30 in the morning, saw the resignation of a member who refused to "have my name associated...

'Don't Mention the Oscars': As the Awards Race Heats Up, NEWSWEEK Gathers Some of the Year's Most-Buzzed-About Actors for a Rowdy Talk about Careers, Art and Money

Byline: Jeff Giles and David Ansen If you listen closely to the tape of NEWSWEEK's fifth annual Oscar Round Table, the first thing you hear is one participant kissing another participant on the cheek. Yes, that's right: we invited actors this time....

Enron and Fuzzy Math: As the Accounting Scandal Unfolds, the U.S. Budget Surplus Vanishes

Byline: Allan Sloan We heard a shocking tale in congressional hearings last week about huge amounts of money vanishing overnight, transactions with important consequences for everyone in the United States and math so fuzzy you want to hang it on...

From Villain to Victim: In 1976, Prosecutors Tore Patty Hearst's Credibility to Shreds. A New Case against Her SLA Partners Rests on Rehabilitating It

Byline: Mark Miller She was the spoiled rich kid who unaccountably helped her own kidnappers wage a campaign of robbery and wanton violence, a reckless debutante with an extreme case of radical chic. And when she went on trial for taking part in...

In A Peaceful Frame of Mind: Patients Demanding Control over Their Medical Care May Not Relinquish It in Their Final Days

Byline: Anna Quindlen It was the part about reading that got to me. by the time Joan and Chester Nimitz Jr. had decided to die together, their laundry list of physical losses was nearly as long as their rich and fruitful lives. Chester Nimitz, 86,...

'I Told a Friend: Africa Changed Me': Melinda Gates Talks about Her Global Mission and Her Passion for Privacy

'I TOLD A FRIEND: AFRICA CHANGED ME' MELINDA GATES TALKS ABOUT HER GLOBAL MISSION AND HER PASSION FOR PRIVACY Melinda French was a 29-year-old Microsoft manager when she married Bill Gates in a private ceremony on a Hawaii golf course in 1994, and...

Byline: Keith Naughton It was Chrysler's coming-out party for its most important new model. Surrounded by a throng of reporters at the opening day of the Detroit Auto Show, the Chrysler brass touted the "breakthrough" styling of the sleek Pacifica,...

Mail Call: Readers Lambaste the Self-Serving Behavior of Enron Executives at the Expense of Company Employees

READERS LAMBASTE THE SELF-SERVING BEHAVIOR OF ENRON EXECUTIVES AT THE EXPENSE OF COMPANY EMPLOYEES Deception and Disaster Kudos to Allan Sloan for the most coherent description of Enron's failure that I have seen ("Who Killed Enron," Business, Jan....

Byline: Daniel Klaidman and Melinda Liu The Gaeda fighter was ragged and underfed, just another prisoner dragged off the battlefield by the Northern Alliance. Searched by his captors, he turned over a small notebook with names and numbers scrawled...

Byline: Lorraine Ali, Marc Peyser and Devin Gordon Glitter Fades to Bitter Last week Mariah Carey, the chanteuse with more No. 1 hits than any other living recording artist, and EMI's Virgin Records said the termination of their multialbum contract...

One Man's Relentless War: The Broken Nation's Leader on Al Qaeda and the Taliban

Byline: Lally Weymouth Nobody has a tougher task in the next phase of the war against terror than Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's interim leader. Karzai was appointed to run Afghanistan on a temporary basis by a conference held in Bonn, Germany, last...

"The real scandal here may not be what's illegal, but what's permissible." Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, during the Governmental Affairs Committee's investigation into the Enron bankruptcy "I want to see Enron survive, and for that to happen we...

Rumors of War, Hints of Peace: The Most Likely Scenario in the Standoff between India and Pakistan Is Continued Cold War

Byline: Fareed Zakaria What to make of events in South Asia? Well, after landing in New Delhi recently, I went straight to a dinner with some of India's best strategic analysts to straighten things out in my mind. One of them looked at the tense...

Talking Our Way to Recovery: As Prime Ministers and CEOs Gather for the World Economic Forum, They'll Be Trying to Put the Best Face on a New Era of Tempered Optimism

Byline: Karen Lowry Miller Waking up in New York City on Sept. 12, it was hard not to believe morning-after warnings that the previous day's nightmare had "changed everything." The city, the country and much of the world quit working to watch replays...

Terror Hot Spots: Somalia -- Kids in the Cross Hairs: The War Is Far from over, but What Are the Next Fronts? from Africa to Asia, a Look at the Battles to Come-Both on the Ground and for Hearts and Minds

Byline: Tom Masland in Mogadishu with Roy Gutman in London Somali fundamentalists didn't figure anybody would mind when they took over a looted and abandoned high school in downtown Mogadishu. They weren't building a bomb factory or training terrorists....

The Battle Back Home: On the Eve of the State of the Union Address, the Democratic Leader Looks for Chinks in a Popular War President's Armor

Byline: Howard Fineman Dick Cheney was on the line, and it wasn't to chitchat. The vice president rarely calls the Senate leader--a Democrat he dismisses as an "obstructionist"--so Tom Daschle knew the topic was important when he hurried into his...

The Gambler Who Blew It All: The Bland Smile Concealed an Epic Arrogance. the Fall of a Preacher's Kid Who Thought He Had It All Figured Out

Byline: Evan Thomas and Andrew Murr You could always tell it was bonus time at Enron when the shiny new silver Porsches began arriving in the company garage. The $100,000 sports car was the status symbol of choice among the young Masters of the...

White-Collar Man in A Blue-Collar World: My Job Requires Skills, like Driving a Forklift, I Haven't Got. My Ivy League Education Won't Help Me Now

Byline: Bob Muldoon Can you drive a forklift?" Those five deflating words instantly alerted me that my prep-school background and advanced degrees would mean nothing on the new job. Alas, I have two Ivy League master's degrees--and two left thumbs....